“Every girl is beautiful… until they kill somebody.”

Wowie wow wow, the acting (or the dubbing) by our two leads is terrrrible. But I’ve seen this once before so I knew that and could focus on other things this time. Nice title music by Ennio Morricone, decent camerawork and good shot choices. Ultimately a stupid movie though, not half as good (or half as ludicrous) as Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street. Worth watching only for Fuller completists like myself, or possibly for Claude Chabrol’s loony performance.

Bobby’s silhouette getting nabbed backstage:

Bobby Di Cicco, who I don’t remember being completely horrible in The Big Red One, is a loser wannabe musician who sneaks into the orchestra every night and watches from backstage. He meets Véronique Jannot at the unemployment office and they decide to take revenge on the agents there who humiliate the two while failing to find them work. First up is a mustache-grooming woman they call Mussolini, then a pervert they call Tartuffe played with campy hilarity by Claude Chabrol.

C.C. wearing funny gloves:

But when Tartuffe falls out the window (in an incident of neighborly peeping gone wrong) our two hero losers are on the run, assisted by Bobby’s music-shop-owning ex-con buddy and a girl they met while breaking into her dad’s house. These two accomplices (whom our heroes seem to barely know, but are willing to assault cops to help them get away) are nearly as awful actors as our heroes, but they have better voices… his is low and TV-cop-show-like, hers is small and airy.

Oh yeah, here’s Bobby:

And what’s her name, Veronica:

Presumably (or hopefully) the accomplices are arrested for being horrible liars. Our couple goes on the run. In a snowy small town rest stop en route to Spain, a loose-cannon ex-cop is introduced only moments before pulling out his gun and blasting away, killing Veronica. Bobby is wounded, somehow makes it back to Paris only to sneak into the orchestra, con his way onstage and die mid-performance… nice.

Movie isn’t a total waste of time – there are a few nuts scenes… some pretend-incest that seems to repulse/turn on landlady Christa Lang… Sam Fuller as “Zoltan” a jewelry fence and death-scene enthusiast with an eyepatch concealing a magnifying contact lens… the outer-space sound effects over Ennio Morricone’s score on the final scene.

Christa:

Sam:

Cameo as a brothel madam by Micheline Presle of some Demy movies, The Nun, I Want To Go Home and American Guerrilla in the Philippines:

NY Times called it “a rather mediocre crime story about a Bonnie-and-Clyde couple.” The video box calls it a tribute to the French New Wave. I’m not sure how, exactly… unless the final shootout in the snow is in memory of Shoot The Piano Player.